Blog

The severe snow storms on the east coast didn’t prevent the Transportation Research Board’s Annual Conference taking place in January, and SWARM CEO Anthony Howcroft presented at a panel on Digital Transformation in Ports hosted by Asst. Professor Lawrence Henesey of the Swedish Blekinge Institute of Technology, along with Joseph Ruddy, Chief Innovation Officer at the US Virginia Port Authority.

For 10,000 years the world has been fed by grains; mainly wheat, corn, and rice. Only a few decades ago world population growth trends were leading people to predict massive starvation, but the Green Revolution of the 1960’s resulted in crop yields rising from 1.4 tons to over 3.2 tons per acre today. Even so, with wheat consumption forecast in 2018/19 to be higher than production for the first time in a decade, changing weather patterns, and a technology revolution rolling through the world of agriculture, today’s grain organizations are in a heightened state of digital transformation.

SWARM Engineering has been selected by TERRA, the leading Food and Agriculture Accelerator, into its third cohort kicking off next week at the San Francisco tech campus of program founder RocketSpace. SWARM Engineering was chosen as one of the 16 most innovative startups from across the globe to work alongside industry giants including founding partner Rabobank, as well as AgroFresh, Beta San Miguel, Graincorp, Griffith Foods, Grupo Azuca de Mexico, Nestle, OSI and Tate & Lyle.

The SWARM team were on-hand at the MAST conference in the Port of Hueneme to meet various participants in the port's eco-system and to learn more about their opportunities and challenges. Did you know that the Port of Hueneme has a speciality in 'cool' cargo, and leads the West coast in banana imports - receiving more than 600,000 tons per year from over 150 vessels?

Anthony Howcroft, CEO of SWARM Engineering, presented at the IGNITE22 event organised by Braid Theory in San Pedro. Anthony discussed the way in which multi-problem optimisation can be used to tackle some of the efficiency issues found in typical port environments such as the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach.

Mixing raw materials together as input to a production process, or to make a new or intermediate product, should be an easy task. It’s certainly a common one, from the food industry through to the production of metals, paints, and even the use of crude oil at a refinery. The goal is normally to make a product that matches specific quality or regulatory criteria (taste, percentage of a certain element, tannin levels in wine, and so on)

Every day or so, a friend will send me a youtube link showing a swarm of robots doing something fun. They might be nudging a mobile phone into a user’s hands, completing a military mission, or creating a fancy light-effect behind Lady Gaga at Superbowl. These are entertaining projects, and are often the spearhead of smart academic research. They are not, however, connected enough to the daily problems at most organizations to inspire

People are fond of listing things that computers & robots can’t do; like creating original artwork, composing a symphony, appreciating fine wine, or cooking a tasty and nourishing meal from a handful of ingredients. We’ll temporarily ignore the fact that many people can’t do those things either (and some machines can), and look at the equation from the other side. Modern machines, with advanced sensor technology, huge processing capacity, and sophisticated learning algorithms, can do many things we can’t.